All work by this artist
Christine Comyn

Born in Tielt, Belgium, in 1957.
Christine Comyn demonstrated a natural aptitude for painting and drawing at very young age and refined her artistic talents at the Saint-Luke Academy in Ghent (Belgium). Her artistic journey began in the early 80s by mastering the delicate and unpredictable technique of watercolour. Her paintings showed somewhat dreamy but always beautiful and sensual young females figures, often with suppressed emotions.

By the beginning of 1990 Comyn chose to abandon her solely figurative style and unleashed a body of work that earned her recognition by a most discriminating international clientele. Refusing to adopt a wild and free-form style Comyn instead preferred to explore the potentialities of colour and rhythm, without neglecting the need for structure. The result: explosive colour compositions that possessed a unique pictorial tension amidst logical balance.

From 1993 she merged her propensity for figurative and abstract techniques and allowed herself to study her new-found interest in figurative painting, especially the human body. The style of her paintings, as she has created them until now offer us a combination of abstract and figure painting. Her art work unites the somewhat hard character of acrylics and the more lively and light one of watercolour. Each technique could also act autonomously, but without achieving the power and compactness of the global effect that is so typical for Christine Comyns paintings.

During the last few years Christine Comyn began to combine her passion for contemporary female portraits with her interest for 18th century art and history, more specifically with the character of Marie Antoinette, the last queen of the Ancien Régime, who had always fascinated her. Her most recent art project “La Douceur de lIgnorance” rose from the intention to make the ties between the time of Marie Antoinette and our contemporary world visible, and especially those concerning women. Beside her traditional acryl and watercolor paintings, Comyn experimented with modern visual techniques like digital photomontages and compositions. Thanks to these very innovative methods she can digitalize her pictorial work and assemble details from different pictures in a new polyvalent work. The result of this both visual and conceptual association process are images charged with a deep symbolical significance.

Thanks to this latest project, Christine Comyn has reached her artistic maturity. She has reflected over the meaning and the expressive potential of the portrait as an art-historical genre, over the technical bounds of painting as a medium and eventually over art as an universal mean of communication.